Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Texas Airports Add International Flights

Texas will finally get a nonstop flight to Australia this May when Qantas starts flying between Dallas/Fort Worth and Sydney four times weekly. Qantas is OneWorld partners with American, so the latter airline’s fortress hub at DFW should provide plenty of connecting traffic. This is a big shot in the arm to DFW’s relatively new International Terminal, which continues to lag behind Houston in terms of drawing new international flights.

Whenever Boeing gets around to delivering the 787, Continental/United plans to start nonstop service between Houston Bush Intercontinental and Auckland, New Zealand. Between that and Continental/United’s Houston-Lagos nonstop scheduled to launch in November, Houston will join Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Johannesburg as one of only four airports in the world with scheduled nonstop passenger air service to all six inhabited continents so long as you count the region of Australasia as a pseudo-continent.

Meanwhile, here in Austin, our international passenger service continues to be anemic. We’re barely able to sustain service to Cancun on an ongoing basis.

No comments: